Spotify Technology S.A.

Good day and welcome to Spotify's fourth quarter 2025 earnings call and webcast. All participants are on a listen-only mode. If you require operator assistance at any time, please press star zero. As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded. I would now like to turn the call over to Brian Goldberg, head of investor relations. Thank you. Please go ahead.

Thanks, operator, and welcome to Spotify's fourth quarter 2026 earnings conference call. Joining us today will be our founder and executive chairman, Daniel Ek, our co-CEOs, Alex Nordstrom and Gustav Soderstrom, and our CFO, Christian Luiga. We'll start with opening comments from the team, and afterwards, we'll be happy to answer your questions. Questions can be submitted by going to slido.com, S-L-I-D-O.com, and using the code hashtag SpotifyEarningsQ425. Analysts can ask questions directly into Slido and all participants can then vote on the questions they find the most relevant. If for some reason you don't have access to Slido, you can email investorrelations at ir at spotify.com and we'll add in your question. Before we begin, let me quickly cover the safe harbor. During this call, we'll be making certain forward-looking statements including projections or estimates about the future performance of the company. These statements are based on current expectations and assumptions that are subject to risks and uncertainties. Actual results could differ materially because of factors discussed in today's call, in our shareholder deck, and in filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. During this call, we'll also refer to certain non-IFRS financial measures. Reconciliations between our IFRS and non-IFRS financial measures can be found in our shareholder deck, in the financial section of our investor relations website, and also furnished today on Form 6K. And with that, I'll turn it over to Daniel. Daniel.

All right. Hey, everyone, and thanks for joining. As a short counting exercise has just shown me, this is my 30-second earnings call. And as you know, this was the last one that I did in the role as CEO. Alex, Gustav, and Christian will give you an overview of the business and cover the quarter. But before I hand it over, I wanted to share a few thoughts. First, I want to say gratitude to the incredible teams at Spotify, to the artists, creators, and authors we build for. The more than three quarters of billion people listen with us daily. Thank you. And thank you to all of you as well. I can say that I've generally valued these conversations with our investors, with analysts, and even the tough questions. Getting to build a company like this and to share that journey with people who care about where it's going, it's been a real privilege. From day one, our focus has been simple. Build the best experience for listeners, be the best partner for artists and creators, and do it in a way that scales globally. And that remains true almost 20 years in. And for those participating on the call, I know a huge portion of your role is scoring the companies you cover. So if you want a framework for evaluating Spotify going forward and what to hold us accountable to, I'd point to three key things. And then you must also layer on the culture that makes them possible. First, we saw problems at the intersection of consumers and creators. This is where we focus. If something is good for the consumer, and also good for the creator, that's where you'll find us. Every time. Discovery Weekly, Wrapped, Spotify for Artists, our new mobile free tier, these aren't just features, they're proof points. We build tools that help artists reach listeners they'd never find otherwise, and in turn, help listeners discover music they didn't know they'd love. And we built an ecosystem where artists, listeners, creators, authors, and advertisers reinforce each other. That intersection is where we've always won, and it's where the next decade gets built. Second, we are first and foremost a technology company. We've said for years that we aim to be the R&D arm for the music industry. And if I may say so, nearly 20 years in, I think we've earned that. We drove the shift from downloads to streaming and subscription, and we proved the model could work at scale. But here's what excites me the most. Our capabilities now extend far beyond music. Today, what we built is a technology platform for audio, and increasingly for all the ways creators connect with audiences. And this identity will matter even more going forward. The next wave of technology shifts, AI, new interfaces, wearables, new ways of interacting with content, these will reshape how people discover and experience audio and media. The hard problems I had in music, in podcasts, in books, in video, in live, and in things we haven't even built yet, we're going to keep building the technology to solve them. Third, we play the long game. When we went public in 2018, I talked about long-term value creation. While I know many of you focus quarter to quarter, that's not how we grade ourselves, and it's never have been. We choose growth over profitability for many years, and I know that was painful for some of you, but in order to scale, it was the right thing for consumers and creators, and ultimately for the business we're running today. We acquired Echonest back in 2014, when most people didn't understand why a streaming company needed a machine learning AI company. and that bet gave us personalization something that's now core to everything we do we built our ubiquity play that's called spotify connect starting in 2011 right as we launched in the us at the time every major tech platform was building their own wall garden for audio the conventional wisdom was pick an ecosystem and live inside it we bet the other way we decided spotify should work everywhere in your car your speaker your tv your gaming console regardless of whose ecosystem you're in. Apples, Googles, Amazon, Samsung, Sonos, all of them seamlessly. And today, Spotify works across more than 2,000 devices from over 200 brands. And you can start a song on your phone and you can finish it on your TV. That doesn't happen by accident. It happens because we choose ubiquity over control, openness over lock-in, and we stuck with it for over a decade. These weren't obvious calls at the time, but they compound, and that long-term orientation will continue to guide Spotify. Which brings me to talent, because we take a long-term view there too. At Spotify, we built a culture that tries to build and reward trust. Trust to take risks, trust to fail and learn, trust to challenge each other, and share the thinking behind our decisions. And here's why that matters. Moving fast isn't just about how much you ship. It's about shipping the right things. A culture of trust gives you both. People dare to try, but they also dare to debate, to push back, to find a better path together. That's how you iterate quickly without losing direction. If there's trust, most processes are easy, allowing you to move very fast. A culture of trust is hard to replicate. It is why we develop leaders from within. And I think Alex and Gustav are great proofs of this. They've been at the center of nearly every major shift in this company. Mobile, subscription, machine learning, podcast, audiobooks, marketplace, etc., etc. They didn't inherit Spotify. They really helped building it. And of course, I'm not going anywhere. I'll be here as executive chairman, focus on the long term. But this is their moment to lead. And I have deep confidence in them, not because everything will go perfectly. Of course it won't. But because I've watched them solve problems that looked impossible and then do it again and again. And they're not here to protect what I built. They're here to build what we haven't imagined yet. And their success is our success, and I'm rooting very hard for them. And with that, I'm going to hand it over to Alex, Gustav, and Christian.